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Iustitiam Carnis and “Total” Depravity

Philiip Melanchthon identifies the hotly-disputed issue of free will as being “about the deterioration of human strength through sin, man’s inability to free himself from sin and death, and about the works that man is able to do in such a state of weakness.” [As excerpted from the Loci Communes (1521) in The Renaissance Reader, ed. Kenneth J. Atchity [New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996], pp. 131-134.] For Melanchthon, seemingly unlike for Luther, the deep questions of necessity and the relationship of God’s knowledge to human actions are “extraneous questions” that sidetrack the real issues. Free will is about the harmonious relations between man’s understanding, will, and heart. This harmony was lost in the Fall, and “man’s natural powers became very weak.” [Ibid., 131.]

Though corrupted by sin, man’s natural powers did not become utterly useless. So that God might recognize sin and be able to be punished for it, God ensured that some “knowledge remained in this ccorrupted nature, although it is dim and full of doubt and uncertainty about God.” The ability to have virtue toward God (love of God, trust in Him, and fear of Him) was lost, and man’s heart is “wretchedly imprisoned, impaired, and ruined.” However, this ruination does not extend to man’s ability to perform outward acts based on what he does understand of God and his situation as a creature: God “wants all men to have external morality, and thereby learn the distinction between powers that are free and powers that are bound.” [Ibid., 132.]

This is the freedom that St. Paul calls “the righteousness of the flesh” (iustitiam carnis), and it allows for man being able to move his external members “in the performance of the commanded works and duties.” Were this not still possible for fallen man, “then all worldly law and all education of children would be in vain.” But “it is certainly true that through worldly law and the education of children God wants to force men into honorable customs, and such pain and work are not totally in vain. For, as Holy Scripture teaches in 1 Timothy 1:8-11, the law was given for the ungodly to restrain them from becoming worse than they already are.” Further, the law is the schoolmaster that leads us to Christ (Gal. 3:24), and this means that “external morality is necessary, for in a life filled with dissolute, immoral, persistent adultery, gluttony, robbery, and murder there can be neither instruction in the gospel nor acquaintance with it.” [Ibid., 133.]

Two things stand in the way of (fallen) free will’s attempt to achieve the iustitiam carnis: “our own weakness and the devil’s activity.” Here Melanchthon approvingly cites the ancients: “if one does not want to fall into sin, he must turn away from the source” (vitare peccata est vitare occasiones peccatorum). “We should contemplate all this as a reminder to fear punishment and to live morally,” but at the same time, “Although it is certainly true that all men are obliged to live in external morality and that God earnestly punishes external depravity…we must also know that external morality cannot merit forgiveness of sins and eternal life. It is not a fulfillment of the law, and neither is it the righteousness by which a man is justified and received before God.” Salvation comes only through Christ’s merit. [Ibid., 134.]

There are some interesting similarities here between Melanchthon and the Reformed doctrine of Total Depravity, but in light of some recent studies I’ve been doing, I am beginning to believe that the Reformed decision to use words like “total” and “completely” and “wholly” of the negative effects of the Fall has, in our day anyway, had some pretty serious distorting effects on theology and apologetics, not to mention Christian culture. Such language seems to encourage the Fundamentalist-like “Us vs. Them” mentality, wherein we are the Soldiers of Light and they are the Minions of Darkness, fit only for destruction. One of the first casualties of this sort of view is the older Reformed ability (seen in such worthies as Calvin, Hodge, Dabney, and Berkhof) to genuinely appreciate, and perhaps even to learn from, the good things done by unbelievers in their iustitiam carnis. Unbelievers are there to be mocked for their “inconsistencies,” to be blasted for their “autonomy,” to be the target of our all-or-nothing “culture war,” to be a foil for our own supposedly superior “worldview thinking.”

By contrast, it seems to me that Reformed sources from the Synod of Dort to the Westminster Confession to R.L. Dabney take a much more sober-minded tack to the issue in that they continually present the negative effects of the Fall as ethical and related only to salvation, and not as a destruction of basic human nature itself. Dort qualifies its own “total” depravity language by saying that the error it is rejecting is of those who say that “corrupt and natural man can make such good use of common grace (by which they mean the light of nature) or of the gifts remaining after the fall that he is able thereby gradually to obtain a greater grace – evangelical or saving grace – as well as salvation itself.” [Rejection of Errors in the Third and Fourth Point of Doctrine.] Question 25 of the Westminster Larger Catechism says that in the Fall man became “utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite unto all that is spiritually good, and wholly inclined to all evil, and that continually.” Dabney says it even more clearly:

[Depravity] is, in its origin, privative, and not the infusion of some positive quality of evil into the soul….native depravity is not a substantial corruption of the soul; i.e., does not change or destroy any part of its substance. For souls are, as to their substance, what God made them; and His perfections ensure His not making anything that was not good. Nor is there any loss of the capacities or faculties, which make up the essentia of the soul. Man is, in these respects, essentially what his Creator made him. Hence depravity is, in the language of metaphysics, not an attribute, but accidens of the human soul now. [Dabney, Lecture XXVIII, Systematic Theology, pg. 322.]

Let me hasten to say that I’ve never actually seen an orthodox Reformed writer say that the Fall metaphysically ruined man such that natural things are all bad and only spiritual things are good, but from where I sit there sure seems to be a disturbing trend of rhetoric that could be seen as a slippery-slope to such sub-Christian dualism. I think it’s better to go with the more restrained presentations of Melanchthon and the older Reformed sources.

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22 Responses

This is a very helpful post. The more extreme view of Total Depravity questioned here reminds me of some of the perspectives put forth by Hoeksema as over against Kuyper, wherein the latter argued that there is a SENSE in which fallen, unregenerated men, carry out the dominion mandate through say, art, music, wider cultural activities, etc., whereas Hoeksema wanted no part of it.

While one might quibble with the term “common grace” it seems to me that the more moderate position of Melancththon or even Dabney has much to commend it.

It also hearkens one to the more restrained and highly admirable, “let’s mirror the language of Scripture without overly speculating on the matter” approach that I have noticed among several Anglican divines, who were frankly not interested in squeezing this or that series of texts into a predetermined mold such that “the system” was airtight in every respect.

I recall hearing a “Reformed” Baptist ranter once shouting at his unconverted hearers indicating that their lives were worthless and meaningless. Of course, he probably did not mean it quite that way, but it would seem that his failure to appreciate the dynamic underscored in this post between ethical vs. metaphysical depravity got him in that unfortunate predicament.

There is a wonderful article by Dabney entitled something like, “God’s Indiscrimminate Proposals of Mercy No Threat to His Justice” (or “Sovereignty” I forget which) where he spends a significant amount of time discussing God’s love for the entire world, and thus, offering what has been called the “moderate” Calvinistic view also seen at Dordtrecht as Tim rightly notes.

It seems to me if a theological system is not high on the “pathos quotient” we should view it with extreme suspicion. Any presentation of the faith which would seemingly sequester a Daniel or the captive Israelites in anti-cultural obscurantist coffin is sub-biblical in the extreme.

Interestingly, Dabney also says that those who would deny the legitimacy of natural theology in the name of the superiority of special revelation thereby destroy all human ability to understand revelation, period. This is because by starting with a radical denigration of reason in order to avoid elevating general revelation and man’s powers of comprehension supposedly “too high,” one cannot then appeal to reason later as a way to understand special revelation. Perhaps Dabney did not foresee the question-begging of certain “presuppositionalists,” who think the answer to this problem is simply making a “brute fact” claim to be regenerate.

It’s not clear to me viz. your reference to “brute facts” (that’s straight from Van Til, no chaser) whether you have “Van Til proper” in your cross-hairs, or sloppy, re-fried servings of Van Til current hour.

If you have, I am wondering if your take on him is that he was significantly obscurantist in his engagement with non-believing thought.

I personally have a mixed assessment of his work. On the one hand, I see the Pauline modus operandi at Mars Hill to be unquestionably presuppositionalist in its overall character. And yet, at the same time, I see a pathos there that often seemed to be lacking in such otherwise gifted presuppositionalists as Van Til and Rushdoony.

Hoss, I have read a good bit of Van Til, yes. I have mixed feelings about Van Til himself, but recently Frame put some meat on my more general impressions by noting that Van Til was something of a “Reformed chauvinist” who did not bother to really engage other positions but only sought to destroy them. However, I am aware of distinctions among Van Tillians. Some are indeed obscurantists when it comes to engaging unbelieving thought; others are less so.

What bothers me about the whole Van Tillian project, generally speaking, is its subjectivistic emphasis on the value of regeneration for intellectual work (this takes the focus of the antithesis off the ethical and makes it metaphysical and epistemological) and its devaluation of reason in the name of revelation. Obviously it is possible to be a rationalist, compromising the Faith with vain human reason. But on the other hand, it seems to me that when Van Tillians are often called fideists the charge is really not so far off the mark as they complain it is.

Tim – What you underscore is something that struck me when reading Pratt’s apologetics, viz. this notion that regeneration, in addition to being a kind of metaphysical alteration of the individual (I am not convinced that when Scripture uses the term in this fashion, it has this subjectivist ethos in view) becomes the sina qua non justification for engaging this or that system of thought (as an aside, it is also interesting that most of Van Til’s books, if I recall, lack indexes and are not well-footnoted, suggesting a lack of careful engagement with opposing systems of thought).

Of course, Barth himself called Natural Theology the “Antichrist” (albeit in another context), so it would seem these problems are not limited to Van Til.

It seems to me that the Reformed world has been, for the past several decades or more, bereft of men who are able to engage the wider culture, zeitgeist, what have you. In the worse case scenario, they don’t even make the attempt, and thus, address all of their ammo to interior, ecclesiastic concerns, even ones which terminate solely and exhaustively on their own Calvinistic club.

As far as your notation of the lack of footnotes and indexes in Van Til, Frame also says that while Van Til was an intellectual he was not a scholar. He further notes that the Van Tillian movement has recapitulated this feature: many Van Tillians are intellectuals, but few are scholars. There is a difference. Scholars engage other positions and (usually) take a lot of care to dot their i’s and cross their t’s properly. Intellectuals don’t necessarily do that. What often strikes me as I read Van Til’s jargon-filled sentences is that while he was indeed a very smart man, he lacked the ability to communicate his very complicated ideas to non-specialists. I can’t help but wonder how many people read his dense discussions of, say, things like the vacillation of unbelieving thought between “rationalism” and “irrationalism” and think he must have known what he was talking about because he sounds so “deep.”

On the other hand, people like Rushdoony have lots of footnotes, which also tends to make the unwary think they know what they were talking about, but sometimes, if one actually knows a few things about the subject under discussion it becomes clear that they are misciting or misinterpreting the sources they are footnoting. For instance, in The One and the Many Rushdoony claims to be citing Plato on love, but actually he misreads the Platonic dialogue (the Symposium) that he’s citing from and attributes the position on love held by one of Plato’s opponents to Plato himself. I’m told that this is not an uncommon feature of Rushdoony’s works. Yet how many Reformed people have had their views of “the Greeks” shaped by works like this? It would not be difficult to find all manner of disparaging remarks about “the Greeks” plastered all over Reformed websites, but how many of those guys have actually taken any serious time to read the Greeks, as opposed to getting all their views on the matter from “reputable” Reformed sources that sound like they know what they’re talking about?

As for your last remark, I am continually amazed whenever I read older Reformed theologians, especially from the 19th century, at their intellectual-scholarly diversity. Hodge is just as comfortable with talking about the latest trends in philosophy as he is with exegeting Romans 9. Presbyterian theological journals from that time period frequently engage contemporary literature, comment learnedly on politics, and engage unbelieving thought with a lot more resources at hand than just “the plain meaning of Scripture.” Not only Hodge, but Dabney and Schaff and others frequently cite from original Latin sources and don’t bother to translate the citations – their educated readers (this was back when there actually was such a thing as education) were supposed to be able to decipher them for themselves.

So there is just a huge contrast between Calvinists of 100 or 150 years ago and the Calvinists of today. I am increasingly persuaded as I read sources that many of today’s Calvinists won’t touch with a ten-foot pole (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Aquinas, and the like) that your basic 5-Pointer biblicist polemics against philosophy and culture are a kind of intellectual Luddite-ism and are leading a great many people astray. Not just astray in terms of what the Reformed faith (and behind it, the Reformation itself) is, but also in terms of being able to responsibly deal with the world outside of Reformed theology. Well, actually, I don’t think it’s limited to 5-Pointer reductionists. A whole lot of supposedly “culture-savvy” Van Tillian types strike me as equally reactionary Fundamentalists – just in Reformed garb instead of Evangelical garb.

Tim – As a PS to our ruminating here, it should be noted that Rushdoony’s work, while self-consciously drawing upon Van Til, was characterized by a much broader, more catholic ethos.
Thus, Rushdoony spoke very differently about the so-called “Dark Ages” than has the average Calvinist, had high regard for the contributions of Roman Catholic thinkers (one of his closest friends was the Dean of Notre Dame’s School of Law, Ed Murphy), and generally had no time for those whom he derisively termed, “The Tulip Calvinists” in what he called their “Coffin Churches” (interestingly, later in life, in correspondence with Frame, Rushdoony referred to Himself as an “Anglican” and lamented the failure of 17th century Protestants to unite under a common liturgy and confession, viz. the Book of Common Prayer.

Re his scholarship, his work had very concretic ends, whereas Van Til was, ironically (for all VT’s of “Greek thought”) very abstract. Thus, the the renaissance of Christian homeschooling, the rise of the so-called “Christian Right”, are commonly attributed to Rushdoony by friend and foe alike.

It seems his practice of reading and cataloguing a book a day for 50 yrs bore much fruit, notwithstanding the inevitable blandishments, one of which you cited.

Ah, I understand now, Pastor Johnson. I well understand having feathers ruffled when a friend is attacked.

In my own defense, though, I have gotten some of my understanding of problems in VT’s views from John Frame. I have to say that the behavior of a very large number of Van Tillians on the Internet simply confirms for me Frame’s judgment that “movement” Van Tillianism, at least, is a kind of Reformed chauvinism that keeps Reformed people locked up inside their own circles and often unable to constructively engage those outside.

Other problems with VTian thought have occurred to me as a result of my present schooling, in which I am spending a great deal of time reading and grappling with the works of both unbelievers and Christians who were supposedly violators of the “antithesis.” The more I read of Aristotle and Plato and Aquinas and Scotus and the like, the less VT’s thought seems to me to be a responsible treatment of the issues which arise from those works. Additionally, it is beginning to seem to me that VTianism is just one more form of the intellectual Modernism it rails against, and this is not least because it stands in the Cartesian and Kantian traditions of philosophy.

Nevertheless, my understanding of VT, VTianism is “in process.” I do not consider myself an expert on the issues, and am always willing to heed constructive criticism.

Tim writes: The more I read of Aristotle and Plato and Aquinas and Scotus and the like, the less VT’s thought seems to me to be a responsible treatment of the issues which arise from those works. EOQ

It is important to realize that CVT is NOT treating these men at all, but is interacting with contemporary writers and their accounts. You are right: Had he been a scholar, he’d’ve taken up whether his contemporaries had Plato or Scotus right in the first place. But that’s not what he was doing. He saw himself as doing apologetics, not scholarly history.

His work on the Greeks, for instance, is simply Werner Jaeger. It’s really Jaeger’s account of the Greeks, not the Greeks themselves he’s interested in. Of course, if Jaeger is not, or is no longer, trustworthy, then CVT’s comments on the Greeks is called into question.

This needs to be born in mind when dealing with him. And btw, his best stuff is in books like Introduction to Systematic Theology, Christian-Theistic Ethics, and The Doctrine of Scripture.

Well then, Frame’s point about VT and VTianism producing many intellectuals but very few scholars would seem to be borne out, and now we have to face Jonathan Bonomo’s question on the Westminster Seminary / Enns thread about the proper relationship of the Church and the Academy.

And for those of us interested in building a Christian culture we probably need to re-assess the value and place of apologetics, since in the wake of VT it’s become pretty much nothing but a bunch of negative slams of others based for the most part on intellectual (not scholarly) caricatures, irrational phobias about the Barbarians at Our Gates, and a highly questionable understanding of the relationship of Calvinism to the rest of the Christian world.

Not trying to be a contrarion, but Van Tillianism caused me to appreciate non-reformed and unbelieving thought much more. I developed a framework ro understand that as images of God they have a hard time being consistently pagan, and many are quite brilliant since they tale on the responsibility of exlaining everything where Christians relax in Christ.. Van Til helped me develop a way to weigh them and benefit from them. I know he disparaged non-reformed, non-Christian thought, but I always took that to be a criticism of the conclusions they drew or their wrongness on a macro level. Van Til made me want to plunder the Egyptians and I started reading much more widely. I might be an exception to the rule, though.

That’s my experience as well, Weston. And as you say, his criticisms were of the fundamental presuppositions (wrongness at the start) and of the resulting over-arching worldviews (the big-picture conclusions). There is a lot of “common grace” good stuff in between. There cannot help but be. All ground is common ground (though no ground is neutral ground), and the unbeliever cannot help living and thinking in the real world to a great extent.

Vantillianism enables you to eat the world. Creationist presuppositionalism gives you complete confidence to enjoy Shostakovich. Sadly, there are people who use CVT in the opposite way, but they are hardly faithful to CVT’s own broad practice.

CVT also, of course, destroyed Modernity for all of us who heard him. For Kant, the mind of man is creatively constructive, an internal “activism” that organizes the unknowable noumena. For CVT it is the opposite: Men as creatures are recreatively reconstructive, apprehending what is really out there by the “connective” activity of the Holy Spirit. CVT destroys Kant and all Modernity.

For CVT there is no epistemological problem. Creationism means that God created the mind of man to understand both Him and the world as a hand fits a glove. Plus, the Spirit enables the hand (human mind) to fit the glove (God and creation). The whole project that DesCartes and Kant were working on simply disappears.

Against Kant, people understand God and the world perfectly well. They just don’t like what they see and hence they perform the strange and amazing god-like activity called “self-deception” (Rom. 1). And that’s not an epistemological but a moral problem.

Weston, fair enough. I don’t begrudge someone being able to use Van Tillianism constructively. It’s just that most of what I’ve seen of Van Tillianism, particularly on the Internet, is purely destructive and reductionistic, and tends to encourage Reformed tribalism. I know Van Tillians in real life who aren’t like this, and I would say my disagreement with them, unlike with the destructive warmonger types, is a friendly one.

“Hoeksema as over against Kuyper, wherein the latter argued that there is a SENSE in which fallen, unregenerated men, carry out the dominion mandate through say, art, music, wider cultural activities, etc., whereas Hoeksema wanted no part of it. ”

Wrong. Hoeksema affirmed that the cultural mandate applied to everyone. What he denied what the mandate itself carried a blessing or approbation. Hence, according to Hoeksema the mandate was a positive command, and say nothing about the decretive will. This explains, for Hoeksema, why God can will the earth to flourish and at the same time, will its destruction at the end of time.

Jason – Being that you have opined elsewhere: “The folks at RefCath are nothing but bunch of bloody (sic) deluded fools. We are living in last days (sic) where the doctrine of justification by faith alone is being attacked within so-called conservative REFORMED circles”, and have also referred to Anglo-Catholic brethren as “heretics”, it would be a very injudicious use of time to engage you further. We’ve played this B-rated movie with subtitles before, and shan’t rehash it.

The village is under siege and I can’t do anything about it.

With good reason, Tim Enloe implemented the fated, ‘herem, or ban on your posts over at RefCath (after hilariously referring to having allowed them for “illustrative purposes only”), such that there really is no need for us to expend the energy here to discuss Hoeksema and his eccentricities or other of your rambling missives directed at any and all “heretics” who do not articulate “the gospel” of sovereign grace to your particular tastes.